Mini-Cast # 17: It's Better to be Very Good than Great - First Half

Greetings from Northern Colorado. Your not always faithful podcaster wishes he'd been doing this podcast last January when he was in Kansas City and Austin, but as it happens, he was back in Houston this weekend, and has yet another podcast outlined in his mind from a visit to Houston museums. Talk about a niche market...

The sheer dynamism of Houston never ceases to amaze. There is no city I've ever been to quite like Houston - the city seems one giant highway atop one giant mall, with houses randomly sprinkled among the parking lots. The closest in our Easterners' area to its feel is New Jersey, but New Jersey is giant state-wide suburb where the development is a bit restrained to house residential spaces for so many millions who brave the train and traffic every day to the explosive upward-rather-than-outward development of Manhattan and Center City, Philadelphia. The development of Houston, with its absolute absence of zoning, is unlimited. The residential neighborhood in which I stayed, Galleria, is named for the sixty story building and mall built amid dozens of square blocks of housing. This is also the home of The Summit, former home of the Houston Rockets, which now functions as a 16,000 seat Lakewood Central Church, operated by the famous or perhaps infamous mega preacher Joel Osteen, whose fame spread still more dubiously wide by his refusal to open the church for shelter for congregation of Hurricane Harvey victims. And this weekend, the Lakewood Central Church was the hottest ticket in America to see Kanye West and his Yeezy choir performed his Jesus crap. And once your unfaithful podcaster heard from an uber driver that free tickets were being issued for the evening performance, he deluded himself for a half-hour into thinking that he might be able to score a ticket until the obvious truth he should have thought of was presented to him, that these free tickets were snapped up days ago and re-sold on the internet for 5000 dollars.

On that same day, your less-than-devoted podcaster had a chance to go to the famous Texas Renaissance Fair, a 55 acre town with 25 stages where nerds congregate over nine weekends AND weekdays with more than half-a-million individual attendees every year, a number of whom stay overnight to partake of festivities whom eyewitnesses tell me are as debauchedly pagan as you'd expect in rebellion from the ethos of America's most famously Christian state. Every weekend of the faire has a theme for shows and costumes, the weekend activities commencing and concluding with ceremonies of operatic spectacle. But after a weekend of alcoholic and barbecue consumption at a close friend's wedding, your podcaster feared for his life and turned the chance down for a day of rehydration.

Nothing in Texas is ever done by half-measures, and while I love Texas dearly, I also fear the shit out of it. I wonder if the diversity of Houston exceeds even New York and Chicago, yet while the dynamic flux of New York's racial tension produces a chickenhawk like Donald Trump perfectly happy to stoke racial resentments, the Trumps of the world sit atop their faux-ivory towers to provoke people of a will-to-action they'd never have the foolhardy fortitude to commit to themselves. The famous 'good-ol-boy' network of Texas is clearly alive and well, and the mechanisms of state can still gerrymander themselves well past the point that the true political orientation of 21st-century Texas is yet unknown. But part of what makes these aggressively white demagogues and their resentful constituents so dangerous is their dwindling number. I have no idea if there is truly any chance for civil war in America, or even if such a civil war would be anything more than a low-level conflict that could even be called a war rather than a series of skirmishes that only a small number of militias take part in. But the economic inequalities, the ethnic faultlines, the lack of regulation, the cultural glorification of violence in all manners of rebellion which now seem to be affecting certain kinds of progressives as well as so many millions of conservatives... It all does sound like the faultlines of a certain other period of American history...